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PSTN

Last year, in the context of the EU Telecom Review, I wrote extensively on the issue of "substitutable" telecom services. The EU wanted to assess which online services could be functional substitutes to phone and messaging services and how to regulate them. The topic is far from dead (and has recently been addressed in the context of national security snooping) but I wanted to tackle here a subset of that topic that is often overlooked and seems to me of increasing importance ...

Everything about how we communicate has changed over the past decade. For written communication, we’ve gone from letter writing to email and from email to social media postings. For voice communications, we transitioned from fixed line phones to mobile phones to texting and video calls over the Internet. For data communications, we’ve gone from computers to laptops to tablets and smart phones – let alone the ability to connect to the network anywhere, at any time and in any place. Furthermore, entertainment services have moved from analog to digital and single screen to multiscreen.